Work That Matters

Work That Matters

Create a Livelihood That Reflects Your Core Intention

Create a career that expresses your life’s core intention as you use mindfulness-based guide to clarify your true calling, create a vision for meaningful vocation, and enact practical steps to make that vision a vivid reality.

So many of us feel trapped in wage slavery and deadened to our true talents and life’s purpose. Or we’ve wandered through dozens of jobs and are left feeling adrift and without meaning in our lives. Livelihood is a source of great suffering for way too many.

Author and longtime meditator Maia Duerr wandered through several professions and dozens of jobs (including alfalfa sprout packer and Buddhist chaplain) before she finally unlocked a combination of work that was deeply fulfilling and sustainable. These experiences provided her with rich material to examine the emotional, psychological, and cultural barriers to creating work that expressed her life’s core intention, what she calls “Liberation-Based Livelihood.”

Work is one of the primary vehicles for expressing our deepest selves. Using the 6 Keys to Liberation-Based Livelihood as a framework, Duerr takes readers through a comprehensive process that can lead to breakthroughs and positive reformulation of their careers. Mindfulness practice is an invaluable tool in the process of gaining new perspective. Work That Matters gives you the tools to create joyful work that embodies love and compassion—for yourself, and for the whole world.

A writer, consultant, and coach, Maia Duerr draws on her decades of Zen practice and training in anthropology to create powerful tools for integrating mindfulness into the workplace and in clients’ everyday lives. Through her workshops, online programs, individual coaching, and writing, she has supported people around the world to create work that matters. Duerr has an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she serves as a meditation practice mentor at Upaya Zen Center.

Buddhist teachings and meditation offer a roadmap to help college students and others in early adulthood incorporate mindfulness into their lives as a means of facing the myriad struggles unique to this stage of life.

The gap between those who have and those who don’t grows; the deep conflicts within our society around race and privilege are pervasive; and many other inequities undermine our sense of safety and belonging in our world. As individuals, we try to satisfy our longing for love and connection with the consumption of more and more stuff. But our unbridled obsession with consuming more of everything with blatant disregard for the impact on us, on other species, and on the planet does just the opposite, eroding our well-being while irreparably damaging our Earth. In The 7 Laws of Enough, leadership consultants Jen Cohen and Gina LaRoche offer readers the tools to make a transformational journey from living a life in a debilitating mindset of scarcity and lack to creating a new mindset of enough...